Design State: A weblog about government web design

In case you missed it the first time around, like I did, WIRED has a good article about the challenges facing the Obama Administration’s attempt to drag federal government use of the Internet into the present.

A key ‘graph about the systemic challenge of this endeavor:

For starters, the federal government operates more than 24,000 separate sites, many of them years out of date. “Nobody stepped back and asked strategically, how do we do this?” Godwin says. “Whenever there is a new initiative or program, they put up a new Web site.” And the first thing they usually do on that site, she says, is post a bandwidth-hogging picture of the bureaucrat in charge.

Godwin and Campbell have been pushing government agencies to treat citizens more like customers, rebuilding their sites to help visitors do things like find loans or obtain passports—rather than serve as static repositories for press releases and personnel photos. “At Housing and Urban Development, for example, one of the missions is to reduce homelessness,” Godwin says. “If you go to HUD.gov, can you find shelter? The answer is no.” If the government can improve itself in these little ways, they say, great. Don’t worry about trying wild stuff, like setting up federal social networks. Many agencies bar employees from even looking at sites like Facebook at work, much less building their own versions.

The Wired Presidency: Can Obama Really Reboot the White House? – Evan Ratliff – 19 January 2009

The article was put together before Obama’s swearing-in, so it is interesting to see how things have played out in the few months since then. For the most part, everything seems to be consistent. The new design of whitehouse.gov and new sites like recovery.gov remain consistent with change.gov and the Obama campaign website. At the same time they suffer from the same content issues that I noted in my review of change.gov, namely, lack of real content, and ease of access to that content.

That’s a big caveat, but these new sites are still light-years better than the other 24-thousand federal government sites. Since we’re so comfortable with the rapid pace of the Internet communication, it is easy for web geeks like me to expect instantaneous improvement, but patience is definitely necessary with our expectations of turning Uncle Sam into Uncle Sam 2.0.

The Change.gov website is a first shot at including and encouraging a broad cast of citizen input and involvement with the federal government.

First Impressions

It is some kind of excellent that I started The Design State on the same day that Change.gov website went live. It looks good, although obviously the offspring of the presidential campaign website of President-Elect Obama. Obama’s campaign was notable for its graphic and web design production values although these certainly changed over time [e.g. The Evolution of Barack Obama's Campaign Website, The Brand Called Obama], and it is nice to see that care extended to this first official site of the Obama Administration.

Audience

The audience for this site is clearly the American people. That might seem a bit too broad, since I think the folks most likely to know about it so soon are the same folks who supported Obama’s campaign for President; but in the same way that Obama made his campaign about inclusiveness and the power of individual impacts, this site is encouraging citizens to become involved in civil service. My Greatest Generation grandparents would be happy to see this if they were still around.

Content

Although the content is very sparse at this time, and much of it is cribbed from the Obama campaign website, it appears that Change.gov plans to offer employment and involvement opportunities on the various listed issues and also pass the time as a sort of giant suggestion box for the American people. A bunch of the pages seems to have no content at all on them, so I wonder if there was more of a push to get the site out quickly than wait until it was ready to go. Earlier today there was still some designer spoor trash latin on a few of the pages that is looks like someone cleaned up.

Bells & Whistles

Well, its got a blog and at least three different RSS feeds [e.g. Blog, News, Press]. There’s a YouTube Channel, and an eNewsletter sign-up that encourages you to get your friends involved and will even load your address book into the fields for you. None of which are much use at the moment since there’s no content to look at.

Graphic Design & Markup

The design is great, but not perfect. There is a rich color depth and it looks like there is a bit of Golden Ratio at work as well. The images have some artifacts in them due to image compression. This is most noticeable with images that contain text, and has been present on official Obama-related sites for quite some time. The text is also a bit too small here and there. I have a nice monitor at a high resolution, but the small text size hurts my eyes, especially when it couples with the image compression artifacts.

The markup is XHTML Transitional and is close enough to validating to not really pick on. The markup does seem to have a preponderance of the <div> element, but they seem to be there mostly to force the graphic design elements to behave. The CSS appears to be using a customized reset stylesheet for its foundation. The site also uses jQuery, a very nice CSS-friendly JavaScript library that I hope to learn how to use someday.

Usability & Accessibility

The accessibility statement sounds nice, but is terrible. While the Change.gov website gives every indication of being accessible to my eye, the statement does nothing to explain to a user just how the site has been made accessible to them. Are there access keys or navigation aids? It would be much nicer to see something like what Mark Pilgrim has been known to put together.

The site is quite usable; it is easy to find the sections you’re interested in, even if there is no content in them. The forms are intuitive and simple to fill out, and it is obvious that someone spent time thinking about how they could improve the user’s experience.

What I’d Change

1. More content: There’s no point in having a beautifully designed site if there’s not equally good content on it. People come for the content, stay for the content and return for the content;
2. Fix the image artifacting: It’ll make the site look nicer, and the image text will be easier to read;
3. Increase the text size;
4. Add more accessibility features and make the accessibility statement meaningful;
5. Make what content is there seem less about Obama and more about how anyone can get involved in improving the government and the nation; and
6. Put all of the RSS feeds in one spot, so that I can subscribe to as many as I want instead of having to hunt them down piecemeal.

Final Impressions

Although the site is very pretty and has some nice shiny Web 2.0 points of access, right now it looks more like a public relations hit than anything else. There’s not much to see once you get past the good design except for the employment sign-up and the suggestion box. It is a good start, but I still feel like I need to wait and see what happens to the site as it matures before I pass an unambivalent verdict.